Lesson Plans|Resources for Talking and Teaching About the School Shooting in Florida

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Resources for Talking and Teaching About the School Shooting in Florida

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Students embraced after a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Wednesday that left at least 17 dead.CreditCreditJohn Mccall/South Florida Sun-Sentinel, via Associated Press

Please let us know what we may be missing, or post your own thoughts, ideas or experiences.

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By now your students know about the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. How are you addressing it in your classroom? Please let us know in the comments.

We asked that question on social media on the morning of Feb. 15, and immediately got advice from several teachers.

Cheryl M. Morin wrote:

This morning, I’ll be asking them what they have heard, creating opportunity to verbalize as well as acknowledge their feelings. We’ll spend some time either writing or drawing as a way to release the energy. We’ll review lockdown procedures for our school. We will do this daily.

We also heard from Clara Green, a social emotional learning coach in Atlanta’s public schools. She sent this email to the teachers she supports:

I am absolutely heartbroken by the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida. This morning, it is more critical than ever than we make students feel welcomed at school. Many of your students may come to school with strong emotions and questions and we must provide a safe space for them to cope with this traumatic event.

Reminding students to report warning signs of mental health issues and possible threats to an adult

Explaining why my classroom door will remain locked every day from now on because it is the only tool we have to protect our students inside the classroom.

And Stacy Matros Hardcastle wrote about the role of school in students’ lives:

We have to make our schools places where students feel a human connection. Places where they would never, ever think to bring a gun to campus.

If there is ever even a whisper that someone has the plan to bring a gun, our teachers and students should be able to communicate freely with law enforcement so that those plans are stopped. There need to be policies that would have allowed physical intervention as soon as yesterday’s shooter posted one of the many disturbing things he did on his social media.

We need to protect each other.

Because The Learning Network is for students 13 and older, the resources below focus on understanding this shooting and its implications, but parents and teachers of younger students might find this advice, published by The Times after the shooting in Newton, Conn., helpful. Our friends at Scholastic also offer these Resources for Responding to Violence and Tragedy.

Students might create a collage or bulletin board profile of the victims, perhaps modeling them on a Times feature like the annual Lives They Lived or the Portraits of Grief series, which profiled those lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Amid this tragedy, there are also stories of great courage and benevolence. Encourage your students to look for “the helpers” — those that risked their own lives and safety to help others. What heroic acts have they read about?

What acts of service can students offer to recognize, honor and celebrate the victims? Brainstorm ways you may be able to offer condolences to the families or the community of Parkland, Fla., or do a related service learning project that grows out of students’ thoughts and feelings about these events, the victims’ lives, the needs of school communities, or actions they can take to prevent tragedies like this in the future.

More than 40 “active shooter” episodes in schools have been recorded in the United States since 2000, according to F.B.I. and news reports. Two 15-year-old students were killed and 18 more people were injured last month in a school in rural Benton, Ky. The shootings have become common enough that many schools, including Stoneman Douglas High, run annual drills in which students practice huddling in classrooms behind locked doors.

With the Parkland shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern United States history have come in the last five months.

It has become very familiar for high-school students to practice the infamous level-three lockdown. In all cases, we all share the semi-nervous chuckle of “wow, maybe we get Swiss-cheesed today” and sit in a corner, stare at our phones and text our friends. Only very recently, after a vivid dream — more a nightmare — of a school shooting, did I realize that sitting in the dark and stopping bullets with locked doors and silence is the exact opposite of what one would want to do. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon the fact that the “people shot and killed in the Columbine library sat there for five minutes before the shooters entered and shot them.” My school is full of able-bodied kids, and surprisingly, a great chunk that has had experience with self-defense and even marksmen training. So why sit and wait?

Has your school been affected by gun violence? What measures do you have in place to prevent future violence, or to respond to threats? Ask students to investigate if they can’t answer that question, then discuss: Do you think your school and community are doing enough to prevent future shootings? If not, what else do you think they should do? What do you think individual students can do, if anything?

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Are We Becoming “Numb” to School Shootings?

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Clockwise from top left: Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.; Marshall County High School in Benton, Ky.; Italy High School in Italy, Tex.; and the Net Charter School in New Orleans have all had campus shootings in recent days.CreditClockwise from top left: David Rolfe/The Winston-Salem Journal, via Associated Press; Ryan Hermens/The Paducah Sun, via Associated Press; KDFW Fox4, via Associated Press; Emily Kask

Thousands of readers have commented on the article about the Parkland shooting. One by Tom from Vermont sums up what he’s read:

The comments here seem so stark and brief. Understandably so, what is left to say? It is becoming so easy to see a headline like the one on this story and shrug. This is the new America. But is it? Something inside me still makes me think we have the resolve to turn this terrible tide.

As a student, I agree that we’ve become numb to the news of school shootings in the United States. My high school has already had two lockdowns this school year because of students bringing guns onto the campus. It happens so often that I think many feel powerless to stop them so the default is to either ignore them or solemnly shake your head in silence. In some ways, I think it’s an attempt to not live in constant fear while attending school and receiving an education because no one should have to. But in other ways, I think some won’t take it seriously until it hits close to home. If we were taking school shootings more seriously than before, then there wouldn’t have been eleven incidents already in the first month of this year. Very few people take active assailant drills at my school seriously. I think that is just an example of denial and how it’s hard to take something seriously unless it actually happens to you or someone you know. Schools can do more than just increasing their security measures and frequently enacting drills. They can also invest in the mental health and well-being of their students and provide the support some of them need in order to prevent these acts of violence.

And Jocelyn Savard from North Carolina shared this perspective:

In Boston, there are a series of billboards promoting gun violence awareness. One reads “Americans killed since the massacre at Sandy Hook” and has a live count of citizen owned gun deaths displayed. I remember walking around a few years ago and being startled at the number. When Sandy Hook happened and my mom told me, I cried for days. Just a few days ago when the notifications showed up on my phone about Kentucky, I barely blinked an eye. Of course, my heart plummeted and I could feel humanity’s downfall one step closer but there was no tears, at church this weekend there was no announcement, no prayer. As a country, we have normalized school shootings so much, made books and movies out of them, make offhand comments about how that guy ‘looks like a school shooter’, that we are rapidly becoming detached to the horror that we call our home.

Do your students agree with these teenagers that “we are rapidly becoming detached to the horror” of school shootings? Why or why not?

How has this latest attack affected them? What do they think we might do to keep from becoming “detached”?

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The Role of Students: Cellphones and Social Media

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Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., hid in closets as a gunman fired a semiautomatic weapon into their classrooms. Seventeen people were killed.CreditCreditSaul Martinez for The New York Times

Technology has allowed the public to witness mass shootings in new and terrifying ways. The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School used their cellphones and social media accounts in real time to share their experiences and spread messages of pain, anger and gratitude, as well as calls to action.

Like many school districts, Broward County’s allows high school students to bring cellphones to school, so long as they don’t interfere with class work. On Wednesday, many students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School held onto their phones for dear life as a 19-year-old gunman, Nikolas Cruz, stalked the grounds and fatally shot 17 people. They used them to keep their terrified parents informed about what was happening. And they used them to keep a visual record of an awful crime.

Hiding in a sweltering storage room with about 40 other students, she typed out a text message to her mother, Stacy, for what she thought might be the last time.

“If I don’t make it,” she wrote, “I love you and I appreciate everything you did for me.”

Students also took to Twitter to post the texts they thought might be their last to their family and friends:

Ask your students:

Whare are your reactions to these firsthand accounts of the violence that took place in Parkland, Fla.?

How have these videos impacted the public conversation around guns and school safety? Why do you think they have had such a dramatic effect? Do you think the fact that your generation is so fluent in social media gives you a voice previous generations did not have? What might be the benefits and drawbacks of that if so?

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The Role of Students: ”They Survived the School Shooting. Now They’re Calling for Action”

On Feb. 15, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School implored lawmakers to act to prevent future violence, calling the frequency of school shootings in the United States “unacceptable.”

“Ideas are great, ideas are wonderful and they help you get re-elected and everything, but what’s more important is actual action,” the student, David Hogg, said on CNN.

Mr. Hogg, whose younger sister lost two friends in the shooting, called on politicians to act.

“We’re children,” he said. “You guys are the adults.”

Since then, as The Times writes, “youthful voices have resonated where those of longtime politicians have largely fallen flat,” and many see in that a reason for hope.

As David Leonhardt writes:

...the movement to reduce gun violence seems to have a new energy, driven by students — who of course have provided much of the energy for previous political movements. Individual schools have already held or planned walkouts. A nationwide protest is scheduled for March 14, with help from organizers of the Women’s March. Teachers are also talking about mass protest, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick explains.

This is life for the children of the mass shooting generation. They were born into a world reshaped by the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado, and grew up practicing active shooter drills and huddling through lockdowns. They talked about threats and safety steps with their parents and teachers. With friends, they wondered darkly whether it could happen at their own school, and who might do it.

Now, this generation is almost grown up. And when a gunman killed 17 students this week at Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., the first response of many of their classmates was not to grieve in silence, but to speak out. Their urgent voices — in television interviews, on social media, even from inside a locked school office as they hid from the gunman — are now rising in the national debate over gun violence in the aftermath of yet another school shooting.

While many politicians after the shooting were focused on mental health and safety, some vocal students at Stoneman Douglas High showed no reluctance in drawing attention to gun control.

They called out politicians over Twitter, with one student telling Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.” Shortly after the shooting, Cameron Kasky, a junior at the school, and a few friends started a “Never Again” campaign on Facebook that shared stories and perspectives from other students who survived the rampage.

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Just hours after 17 people were killed in a mass shooting at their high school in Parkland, Fla., students turned to social media to advocate for more gun control.

What do your students think about these activist teenagers and their messages? What messages or ideas resonate with them the most?

Can their generation effect real change on gun violence? How? What examples are they reading or hearing about — or witnessing themselves — that seem to be having an impact? What are their own personal opinions about what should be done, how and why? What can each of us do as individuals, and what can people their age do together?

We can’t let innocent people’s deaths be in vain. We need to work together beyond political parties to make sure this never happens again. We need tougher gun laws.

If a person is not old enough to be able to rent a car or buy a beer, then he should not be able to legally purchase a weapon of mass destruction. This could have been prevented. If the killer had been properly treated for his mental illness, maybe this would not have happened. If there were proper background checks, then those who should not have guns would not have them.

We need to vote for those who are for stricter laws and kick out those who won’t take action. We need to expose the truth about gun violence and the corruption around guns. Please.

The AR-15 assault rifle, and others like it, is commonly used in mass shootings in the United States. Here's a closer look at likely reasons.

The New York Times reports that the gunman who killed 17 people and injured others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School used an AR-15 assault rifle. This style of rifle was also used in the attacks in Newtown, Conn.; Aurora, Colo.; Las Vegas; and Sutherland Springs, Tex., among others.

Students might watch the video above, then discuss: What are some of the reasons that the AR-15, and other weapons like it, have become so common in mass shootings? How does it compare with other types of guns?

In recent years the regulation of the sale of this style of rifle has come to the forefront of the national gun debate. In a 2017 appeal to the Connecticut Supreme Court, relatives of victims in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School argued:

The companies that manufactured and sold the military-style assault rifle used by the gunman should be held responsible for the 2012 attack.

A lawsuit filed by the relatives said that the AR-15-style Bushmaster used to carry out the shooting in Newtown, Conn., that killed 26 people, including 20 first graders, was specifically marketed as a weapon of war, with slogans and product placement in video games invoking the violence of combat. The lawsuit claims that such promotions were a deliberate effort to make the weapon attractive to young men, like Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old gunman.

Ask students: Do you think AR-15-style rifles should be more strictly regulated in the United States? Why or why not?

Do you think any other measures should be taken to restrict access to guns? If so, what? If not, what else can be done to prevent more mass shootings like this one?

Students might read how others responded to these questions after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and add their voices to the conversation by commenting here since that post is now closed.

Or, take a look at the forum on guns we posted during the 2016 election as part of our Civil Conversation Challenge for teenagers. We invited students to have productive, respectful conversations on several issues dividing Americans, and more than 700 responses came in to the questions we posed about gun rights, the Second Amendment and more.

Inevitably, predictably, fatefully, another mass shooting breaks our hearts. This time, it was a school shooting in Florida on Wednesday that left at least 17 dead at the hands of 19-year-old gunman and his AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

But what is perhaps most heartbreaking of all is that they shouldn’t be shocking. People all over the world become furious and try to harm others, but only in the United States do we suffer such mass shootings so regularly; only in the United States do we lose one person every 15 minutes to gun violence.

He writes that we should “learn lessons from these tragedies, so that there can be fewer of them. In particular, I suggest that we try a new approach to reducing gun violence — a public health strategy.”

Invite your students to take a look at the graphics from a visual essay he did in November after the church shooting in Texas. What do they see? What questions do the charts raise? To what extent do they agree with Mr. Kristof’s conclusions?

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TheGunman

What do authorities know so far about the shooter? What is not yet known?

The man suspected of opening fire inside a Florida high school on Wednesday, killing at least 17 people, is a former student who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons, the authorities said.

… In the hours after the shooting, people who knew Mr. Cruz described him as a “troubled kid” who enjoyed showing off his firearms, bragging about killing animals and whose mother would resort to calling the police to have them come to their home to try to talk some sense into him. At a school with about 3,000 students, Mr. Cruz stayed to himself and had few friends but struck fear in some students with erratic behavior and an affinity for violence.

… In the interview with the Miami news station, the student said Mr. Cruz was a junior at Stoneman Douglas High School when he was expelled last year. He said that students would joke that if anyone were to open fire inside the school, it would be Mr. Cruz. Because of that, students feared him and mostly stayed away from him, the student said.

“A lot of people were saying that it would be him,” the student told WFOR-TV. “They would say he would be the one to shoot up the school. Everyone predicted it.”

Do you think this attack could have been prevented? If so, how? If not, why not?

What might school administrators, teachers and students be able to learn from this attack to prevent others like it from happening? How could they respond to students who may be showing signs of trouble in school, on social media or at home?

What — if anything — should students do if they encounter others who display erratic behavior or inclinations toward violence?